Who can know what unconscious synchronic engine moves us
to think and act in ways that have some connection with events
as they unravel in the real world? Of late, I had been indulging
myself in a casual Graham Greene film retrospective, first
with Sir Carol Reed's The Third Man, screenplay courtesy
of Greene, starring Orson Welles with Joseph Cotton containing
Welles' great improvisation:
Don’t look so gloomy. After all, it’s not
that awful. Remember what the fellow said, “In Italy
in thirty years under the Borgias, they had terror, warfare,
murder and bloodshed but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo
da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly
love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace.
What did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” So long, Harley.
I then went on to view a British television production of
The Tenth Man with Anthony Hopkins and Kristin Scott
Thomas with Derek Jacoby's over-the-top performance of a thoroughly
despicable villain. This led me to search for Our Man
in Havana, another Greene/Reed collaboration, based on
Greene's sly novel, starring Alec Guiness and Maureen O Hara
with Burl Ives and Ernie Kovacs (and a cameo by Noel Coward).
Sadly, no one has thought to bring this 1960 release into
any kind of video format. I suppose one could watch Our
Tailor In Panama, based on John Le Carre's send up of
Graham's story, but as admirable an attempt as the later John
Boorman film is, all the key ingredients are missing, not
the least of which is the allure of Havana.
Now, comes the Phillip Noyce version of Graham Greene's The
Quiet American set in Vietnam just prior to decisive
battle at Dien Bien Phu that saw the ouster of the French
colonial regime and the open door way for overt American military
intervention. Casting aside issues of cinematic appreciation,
what I find really worth considering is Mirimax's decision
to put off theatrical release of this film after the terrorist
bombings in September 2001, based on concerns about its alleged
anti-American sentiments.
I am not up for rehashing US Indochina policy or whether
Graham's book is a slur on America's good name. Having seen
the film I am still wondering what would constitute its alleged
anti-Americanism other that a reprise of those toxic "love
or leave it" sentiments of the rollicking Vietnam years
still known, as far as I know, as "The '60s." It
is, I hope, instructive to take note of Greene's view of his
book:
When my novel was eventually noticed in the New
Yorker the reviewer condemned me for accusing my "best
friends" (the Americans) of murder since I had attributed
to them the responsibility for the great explosion -- far
worse than the trivial bicycle bombs -- in the main square
of Saigon when many people lost their lives. But what are
the facts, of which the reviewer needless to say was ignorant?
The Life photographer at the moment of the explosion
was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing
and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw
driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This
photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine
published in Manila over the title "the work of Ho Chi
Minh" although General ThÈ had promptly and proudly
claimed the bomb as his own. Who had supplied the material
to a bandit who was fighting French, Caodaists and Communists?
…Perhaps there is more direct rapportage
in the The Quiet American than in any other novel
I have written…
Because I loved Graham Greene's The Comedians, set
in "Papa" Duvalier Haiti, which I had read just
a few years ago and so I went in search of the 1967 Peter
Glenville film with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec
Guiness, Peter Ustinov, Paul Ford, (Lillian Gish, Raymond
St Jaques, Zakes Mokae, Gloria Foster, Georg Stanford Brown,
James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson). My search goes on despite
the one less-than-glowing synopsis of the film I found: "Yet
another of the Taylor/Burton sagas which seem to have running
times as long in length [2 hours and 28 minutes] as the relationship
is tenuous..."
Graham Greene continued to be controversial through the rest
of his life, in part because of his associations with Fidel
Castro and Panama's General Omar Torrijos and perhaps because
of his jousts with the Catholic Church that he had converted
to at the urging of his first wife. In any case, other than
Raymond Chandler, I can't think of many writers of that era
who were so readily convertible to the, uh, "silver screen."
In the context of real and imagined discourses on anti-Americanism
and its domestic prophylactic, patriotism—not that I
spend much time reminiscing—I was thinking about then-Vice
President Richard Nixon's Latin American trip in the late
'50's and the fact that he was greeted by stone-throwing demonstrators.
About the same time William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
published their "prescient" novel of international
political intrigue set in Indochina, The Ugly American
(about four years later made into a film starring Marlon Brando).
Leaping forward forty years, this issue is wonderfully transfused
by Simon Schama in his engrossing New Yorker essay,
Unloved American: Two Centuries of Alienating Europe.
Rudyard Kipling, Knut Hamsun, Charles Dickens, Robert Aron
and Arnaud Dandieu are all quoted with compelling effect as
to the American national egocentricity. And for a grand finale,
we are given British tourist and author of Domestic Manners
of the American Francis Trollope's observation after
her visits to the United States commencing in 1827:
If the citizens of the United States were indeed the
devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not
thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion,
that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing
is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that
nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.
And joining the chorus of foreign observers on America's
current policy with one of the more original assessments,
the white hot intelligence of Martin Amis. This from his "Palace
of the End" (March 4 2002, The Guardian):
This is a vital question. Why, in our current delirium
of faith and fear, would Bush want things to become more theological
rather than less theological? The answer is clear enough,
in human terms: to put it crudely, it makes him feel easier
about being intellectually null. He wants geopolitics to be
less about intellect and more about gut-instincts and beliefs
- because he knows he's got them. One thinks here of Bob Woodward's
serialised anecdote: asked by Woodward about North Korea,
Bush jerked forward saying, "I loathe Kim Jong II!"
Bush went on to say that the execration sprang from his instincts,
adding, apparently in surprised gratification, that it might
be to do with his religion. Whatever else happens, we can
infallibly expect Bush to get more religious: more theological.
…When the somnambulistic figure of Kim Jong II
subsequently threw down his nuclear gauntlet, the "axis
of evil" catchphrase or notion or policy seemed in ruins,
because North Korea turned out to be much nearer to acquiring
the defining WMDs, deliverable, nuclear devices, than Iraq
(and the same is true of Iran). But it was explained that
the North Korean matter was a diplomatic inconvenience, while
Iraq's non-disarmament remained a "crisis". The
reason was strategic: even without WMDs, North Korea could
inflict a million casualties on its southern neighbour and
raze Seoul. Iraq couldn't manage anything on this scale, so
you could attack it. North Korea could, so you couldn't. The
imponderables of the proliferation age were becoming ponderable.
Once a nation has done the risky and nauseous work of acquisition,
it becomes unattackable. A single untested nuclear weapon
may be a liability. But five or six constitute a deterrent.
And here is Terry Teachout's opening paragraph from "Pedants
and Partisans" (February 22, 2003, The Guardian):
There are two things desirable for fighting fundamentalists.
The first is not to be one yourself. The US government's war
on the movement is somewhat compromised by the fact that it
is run by scripture-spouting fanatics for whom the sanctity
of human life ends at the moment of birth. This is rather
like using the British National party to run ex-Nazis to earth,
or hiring Henry Kissinger to investigate mass murder, as George
Bush recently did by nominating him to inquire into the background
to September 11. Fundamentalists of the Texan stripe are not
best placed to hunt down the Taliban variety.
My sense is that the current climate (sadly) renders Schama's
incisive contribution an intellectual confection easily dismissed
by realpolitikers. Amis and Teachout are, of course,
critical of the Bush regime's policy making them, in the logic
of legislators of Americanism, anti-American (though it would
be hard to find an alien more in love with America than Amis).
Who can say what is and isn't American in these times of an
abomination like the Patriot Act (It does bring to mind John
Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts)? But then, these may again
be scoundrel times, calling to mind that famous anti American
Samuel Johnson's dictum, "Patriotism is the last refuge
of scoundrels."
Norman Mailer @ 1968 Chicago, Grant Park Band
Shell
foto: Robert Birnbaum